From a latter-day dark satanic mill, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>Time is short and I must write quickly for there is much to do. I'm
>in a small room, surrounded by flat screens, the lights are low. The
>vast machine dreams of 400 billion dollars of assets...streams of data
>are flying around me.
>
>It's oddly beautiful.
In a terrifying kind of way...
>What's wrong with your slave analogy? Why is it so offensive?
>
>Consider...
>
>The women of $pread are saying, in so many words: 'we've reviewed our
>lives, we've reviewed the capitalist system, we've reviewed sexism.
>We've reached certain conclusions about this contentious business,
>this work that so vexes supposedly well-meaning people. Our
>conclusions are different from yours, Bill Bartlett.'
I'm flattered you imagine they have even heard of me.
>That's what they're saying, in so many words.
>
>But then you reply that their conclusions, their ideas, their POV,
>aren't simply on the other side of the aisle from yours - that is,
>something worthy of debate. You compare them to slaves who foolishly
>(perhaps unconsciously) glorify their masters.
No, all I'm saying is that they aren't thinking outside the capitalist box.
>What does it mean to compare someone to a slave? It means you think
>they have zero ability to determine their fate, no 'agency' as some
>put it.
No, it doesn't mean that. I am, after all, as much a slave as they, by my analogy. Of course it may indeed be that we have no ability to determine our fate, but all I am saying is that we can at least imagine something better.
> And if they have no agency, their ideas and their conclusions
>are null and void. They don't exist.
You are getting a little melodramatic now. It never occurred to me to question their actual existence.
>You dismiss their ideas and, by so doing, elevate your own above them.
> You say, in so many words, 'your ideas aren't ideas at all; merely
>the deluded mutterings of a slave who doesn't know she's a slave.'
Perhaps I am saying that. What of it? What's the problem with me preferring my own philosophy?
>But somehow, YOU know. Indeed, you know more about them than they do
>themselves.
I know I wouldn't like to have to spread my legs to earn a crust. I don't much like the sound of your dark satanic computer room either. Though I've had worse jobs than either. Wage slavery may be an improvement on chattel slavery, but it isn't freedom.
>You dismiss them. You dismiss their ideas about their own lives.
Codswallop. I dismiss that analysis.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas